Closely-coupled processors (or hardware resources) may include additional processors, threads in a particular processor, additional cores in a central processing unit, additional processors mounted on the same substrate or board, and/or such devices provided within computers connected by a network fabric into a cluster, a grid, or a collection of resources.
Certain computations (e.g., parallel processing or parallel programming) may benefit from the availability of such hardware resources. For example, a complex simulation may run faster if the simulation is divided into portions and the portions are simultaneously run on a number of processing devices in a parallel fashion. Parallel computing arrangements may include a controller that determines how an application should be divided and what application portions go to which parallel processors. For example, a host computer that is running a simulation may act as the controller for a number of parallel processors.
In a distributed (or batch) computing arrangement, a client may provide a job to a scheduler. The scheduler may distribute the job into one or more tasks, and may provide the tasks to one or more hardware resources. The hardware resources may execute the tasks, and may provide results to the scheduler. The scheduler may combine the results into a single result, and may provide the single result to the client.
However, hardware resources implement multiple heterogeneous server platforms, and some of the server platforms may be incompatible with a parallel and/or distributed program. Thus, the parallel and/or distributed program may execute on hardware resources with compatible server platforms, but hardware resources with incompatible server platforms will be unavailable to the parallel and/or distributed program. This will limit the amount of hardware resources available to the parallel and/or distributed program.